Some of your best leadership moments will be the ones where you said nothing and just stayed.

Some situations have no useful sentence in them. The instinct is to produce advice, because silence feels like failing to help, but advice in those moments is mostly for the person giving it. Staying is the thing with weight: it says this is not too much for me, and you are not being left with it. That message needs no words and is often ruined by them.

If someone near you is having a bad time, go and sit with them without a plan. Do not open with what they should do. Ask if they want company, and if they do, be the one still there an hour later.